Hardship Quotes

Tears are often the telescope by which men see far into heaven.  -H.W. Beecher

Let us be thankful that our sorrow lives in us as an indestructible force, only changing in form, as forces do, and passing from pain to sympathy.  To have suffered much is like knowing many languages.  Thou hast learned to understand all.  -Eliot  
 

How fast we learn in a day of sorrow!  Scripture shines out in a new effulgence; every verse seems to contain a sunbeam, every promise stands out in illuminated splendor; things hard to be understood become in a moment plain.  -H. Bonar
 

Adversity is a severe instructor, set over us by one who knows us better than we do ourselves, as he loves us better too.  He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill.  Our antagonist is our helper.  This conflict with difficulty makes us acquainted with our object, and compels us to consider it in all its relations.  It will not suffer us to be superficial.  -Burke  

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Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents which in prosperous circumstances would have lain dormant.  -Horace  

If you would not have affliction visit you twice, listen at once to what it teaches.  -Burgh  
 

Adversity introduces a man to himself.  -Anon.
 

A smooth sea never made a skillful mariner, neither do uninterrupted prosperity and success qualify for usefulness and happiness.  The storms of adversity, like those of the ocean, rouse the faculties, and excite the invention, prudence, skill, and fortitude of the voyager.  The martyrs of ancient times, in bracing their minds to outward calamities, acquired a loftiness of purpose and moral heroism worth a lifetime of softness and security.  -Anon.  
 

By afflictions God is spoiling us of what otherwise might have spoiled us.  When he makes the world too hot for us to hold, we let go of it.  -Powell  
 

If you want to be miserable, think about yourself; about what you want, what you like, what respect people ought to pay you, what people think of you; and then to you nothing will be pure.  You will spoil everything you touch; you will make sin and misery for yourself out of everything God sends you; you will be as wretched as you choose.  -Charles Kingsley  
 

Stars may be seen from the bottom of a deep well, when they cannot be discerned from the top of a mountain.  So are many things learned in adversity which the prosperous man dreams not of.  -Spurgeon  



Come then, affliction, if my Father wills, and be my frowning friend.  A friend that frowns is better than a smiling enemy.  -Anon.  
 

It is not until we have passed through the furnace that we are made to know how much dross there is in our composition.  -Colton  
 

Paradoxical as it may seem, God means not only to make us good, but to make us also happy, by sickness, disaster and disappointment.  -C.A. Bartol  
 

Affliction comes to us all not to make us sad, but sober; not to make us sorry, but wise; not to make us despondent, but by its darkness to refresh us, as the night refreshes the day; not to impoverish, but to enrich us, as the plough enriches the field; to multiply our joy, as the seed, by planting, is multiplied a thousand fold.  -H.W. Beecher  
 

It is not the critic who counts. Not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause. Who, at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.  -Theodore Roosevelt  
 

Man’s unhappiness comes of his greatness; it is because there is an infinite in him, which, with all his cunning, he cannot quite bury under the finite.  -Carlyle  

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